Hey, I can dig it. I’m about to turn a fridge into a meat ager. Cut away!
We buy a half of a half of a dairy steer every winter; by which I mean we get head-to-tail bits instead of just the front or just the back. It’s always about 150 pounds of meat to freeze (the local meat locker processes for us). Our upright freezer is the size of a standard refrigerator and the meat fills a little more than half the available space.
If that helps you at all.
Kinda suggests that even a bum steer would be too big for my wimpy freezer. 
Checking on the seal…It looks like the rubber is mostly filled with air, and there is a very flexible magnetic component inside. I have a rope light with an AC cord that is less than 1/4 inch thick (it’s a low-wattage light, even though it’s 120VAC). I think I could cut a notch in the seal and insert a power cord, and when the cover was closed, it would re-seal around the cord with minimal heat loss.
If that doesn’t work, out comes the drill, and I’ll put the light where it should have been in the first place.
If I screw up badly, I can get a replacement seal/gasket; it’s probably the cheapest component of the entire freezer, if you exclude the all-important GE escutcheon.
Otherwise, I was planning on installing an AC outlet with a switch and light nearby. Right now, the freezer is being powered thru a 20-ft extension cord from a dryer outlet. At 1.6 amps, it isn’t being overloaded, but a separate outlet with cuttoff switch isn’t a bad idea.
A “punch-light” isn’t bright IMHO, and if it has batteries, those are sure to fail just when you need them most. It’s good for emergencies, not for regular use. If the power goes out while my head is in the freezer, well…you told me so.
We bought a 7 cf chest freezer this year since we raised our first flock of meat chickens. (A 5 cf unit would probably have been adequate but they didn’t have any Energy Star freezers in that size.) We also live quite a distance from the grocery store, so now we can buy whatever they have on sale, rewrap it, and not have to restock for months. We’re planning to raise a pig next year as well as more chickens, and we’ll buy a CSA share and freeze what we don’t eat. We’ll end up with more and better food for a lot less money this way, and the freezer costs approximately $30 to run for a year on top of the $170 we paid for it. As we say here in Minnesota, not a bad deal.
Here’s an idea! For $8 plus batteries, maybe I could stick the light on the inside of the freezer lid (when Ethilrist said “punch-light,” I was thinking about a light mounted on the wall or ceiling). This one, LED-based, might work even better. I don’t know if temperature is a factor for LEDs.
Yep, that’s exactly what I was talking about. Guess I’ve been a little rough on mine, punching them all this time…
batteries at freezer temperatures don’t work well.
You could put velcro inside or on the lid to hold the light, and keep it out of the freezer when you don’t need it. You could also take most any AC adapater and run the very thin cord into the freezer to power the light so you don’t have to worry about batteries.
I don’t know this as a fact but I’ve heard that it’s poor economics to keep your freezer empty when it’s running. It supposedly takes a lot more energy to keep the temperature down when the freezer is full of air.
So I keep my freezer full of ice if I don’t have enough food to fill it. I buy cheap plastic cups, fill them with water, and freeze them. Then I pile them up on the shelves to fill in any empty space.
Plus if the power goes out, a chest freezer stays cold longer than an upright, and any freezer with big ice jugs taking up space stays cold longer than one with lots of empty spaces.
Protip for going out of town and worrying about a power outage: Put a bowl with some ice cubes in it in the freezer. When you return, if the cubes are intact or mostly so, your freezer foods are fine. If instead you find a layer of ice in the bowl, your freezer was out for a dangerously long period of time.
I’m planning on buying a chest freezer in a month or so. 
to have an indicator in even less space; freeze a plastic spice jar half full of water, then put a penny on top. if it is not on top then you’ve had thawing.
Yeah, well, I wouldn’t bother. I bought 2 of them at Walmart, 6 bucks apiece: one barely glowed, the other lasted approx. 5 minutes before dying. Total garbage.
I vote just keep a flashlight near.
Agreed. They are cheap and don’t last long.
If there are butchers anywhere near, or markets with meat shops, they might have good meat buys where you get X pounds of beef, Y pounds of pork, Z pounds of chicken for some set amount. These can be great deals if you have the freezer space, and in my experience can start at about 30 dollars.
Oh, and never put banana popsicles in the freezer. Ask me how I know.
You had a bananarama at your house?
How about banana-flavored pork roast?
My stomach still turns when I think about it.
Or save a penny. Just fill the jar half full of water and lay it down on its side when you freeze it. Then stand it upright.
If you see the ice frozen in the bottom of the jar after that, you know it thawed at some point.
My stomach turns at the thought of pork-flavored banana popsicles. :eek:
I’ve had my chest freezer for six years, and it’s still the best investment I ever made. The only drawback is defrosting it; because of where we live, we have to keep it indoors, but have to move it outdoors to defrost. Major PITA. The build-up of ice gets really bad in the summer (ironically) because of the bagged ice we buy on a daily basis. Kids get ice of the bag, some ice spills down, gets frozen together…
I have an upright, too. Major reason for that is that I’m short and I have trouble reaching the bottom of a chest freezer (and a possibly irrational fear of falling in).
We inherited an ancient chest freezer ca. 1995, and after it died (I’m guessing 3-5 years later) we bought our current model. Can’t imagine how we got along without one.
Defrosting: We haven’t defrosted it since Hurricane Isabel forced the issue in 2003, and it’s only in the past few months that the ice buildup has been getting to the point where I’ve been thinking that we might should defrost it again soon. So at least for us, ease/difficulty of defrosting really hasn’t been an issue, because we go so many years in between needing to do it.
Lights: Ours has an interior light. It works great; I can easily find what I want in the freezer even if the room lights are off. I can’t remember when I last replaced the bulb - it’s been so long that I can’t remember having done it at all, assuming I have had to.
What we use it for: A bit of everything. Right now I’m stashing away half-gallons of the local orchard’s apple cider, so I can continue drinking it throughout the winter. I’ve got several loaves of bread in there, a whole bunch of frozen dinners, several packs of frozen veggies, we’ve had stacks of frozen pizzas, a large bag of cheese tamales from Trader Joe’s, and way more of everything than could possibly fit in our refrigerator’s freezer.
Given your location, I’d say that if you lose power in a winter storm, a cardboard box outside your back door should suffice as a freezer until the lights come on again.